


They Shape Mountains

by skcm



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Post-Game, Post-Trespasser, god-aspirant inquisitor, probably an au, probably non-canon, spoiler-heavy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-24 17:46:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4929193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skcm/pseuds/skcm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rina Lavellan reaches beyond the sky and hungers to shape Thedas as a would-be god. Chronicled within are her rise and fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Where it Starts

It started in the Fade.

The Inquisitor had not felt the call of Mythal in a very long time. It was always like elastic, resilient tendrils wrapped around her shoulders, with a pull strong enough it shook the very foundation of another would-be god. She grew to find comfort in the tug of something even greater than her mortality and her amassed power, but over time, Mythal's silence left Rina complacent in her superiority. The Inquisition suffered for it, reduced to a faint glimmer of what it once was.

And still, as they enacted shadowy plans across Thedas, Rina never heard a word from the 'best' of the evanuris. Some nights, and in some dreams (the ones she would have spent chasing a wolf had a hardened heart not been in the way), she followed what she thought was Mythal. Rina trailed a mystery each time; mysteries were easy when she remembered they were merely truths that she didn't control yet. Didn't own.

Every time, her journey ended at the foot of a tarnished, vine-wrapped throne in the Crossroads. Assumptions lead her to kneel, to pin some importance to it. But she heard nothing; felt nothing.

Until there was something.

And when there was something, it was big and it was loud, and she woke from that thick, wooden crash to find an eluvian beside her bed. Rina's sheets (stained with brown blood and food and full of crumbs out of spite) spilled to the floor like water as she rose. The eluvian was snaked with stone vines not unlike those hugging the throne in her dreams.

She put one foot in impulsively, but the rest of her followed out of compulsion.

Mythal.

There was a path that had been walked before. Convenient. Rina strode it, fierce steps kicking up dust that turned violet and fluttered away into a flock of impossibly small birds, probably messengers, because when she found who had called her, he held out his hand to slow her approach.

"Vhenan," he began, all legplates and furs.

"No. Not 'vhenan.'" Rina didn't hesitate in her rejection. "Where's Mythal?" She closed in, a look like fire and wind on her face. Solas closed his palm and stillness took over. Her footsteps slowed until they stopped.

"Vhenan," Solas repeated. If he had the nerve to insist, she had the audacity to do the same.

"Vhenan," Rina spat.

"Mythal continues, just as you do: unwilling to die. You'd sooner embody death than be dominated by it."

"Tell me something I don't know, _vhenan_." Her nostrils flared in disgust. Being hard of heart was never pleasant, something her former lover understood with the same kind of intimacy. "So why am I here? More answers this time, or more questions instead? You're so good at that."

"I am sorry," Solas interjected. "You are understandably distressed."

"Save it, Solas."

"I will not. You are here because Mythal willed it." He smirked, but his eyes fell to Rina and then looked mournful.

"Oh, right, because you ate another god. I forgot."

Solas mouthed the word: 'Ate.' Barbaric, but to her credit, accurate. He flicked his wrist and Rina saw the anchor he'd stolen as he conjured a portal bristling with energy.

"You took that from me."

"You were in pain. It was necessary."

"I never stopped hurting." She slitted her eyes. "It's moot. I learn from my hurt, and I move on. I wish to the fucking Creators I could teach you that little skill."

"You still revere them."

"I swear at them."

"They are important enough for you to swear at them, then." Solas gestured at the portal. "I will follow."

No compulsion. Rina stepped in out of the same curiosity that carried her from room to room at the Conclave.


	2. By Candlelight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solas seeks an accord with Lavellan in the Fade. And they laugh.

Where he took her didn't matter in the long run, because it was relatively nondescript, despite the twists of the spire. Even as the staircase wove through buildings and in places clung to figments of plaster like a starving child's threadbare survival, she knew it was the Fade, and so she knew it didn't matter. She also knew it wouldn't last.

Besides, he didn't have the balls to do this anywhere else, and in the waking world, Rina was at an advantage. Not because the Dread Wolf was any less powerful there, but because he might remember.

Remember her, remember them, and then forget.

And so the Fade was a necessary precaution.

Solas guided her to a set of chairs flanking a table that looked more like the stump of a tree. Modest. The walls writhed around them. He wasn't the only mage whose will shaped this realm, and Rina was bent on rubbing the very fibers of it against each other until something bad, but better than this, happened.

But everything bad was upon them: The end of days. Chaos, horror, maelstrom. Rina thought she could taste the sulfur in the air already, her last mortal fears made manifest in the Fade.

He waited until she sat before he trailed into a conversation that Rina never wanted to have. "I am not heartless. I feel the pang of regret, as any other might, in my situation."

"You can't regret what you haven't done yet, but I didn't summon _myself_ into the Fade, Solas. Say what you need to say. Let pomp die with the world. Let love die, too, for that matter."

Pressured by her request, he let it out succinctly, like staccato notes that played down the rungs of Rina's spine in sharp little chills. "You have seven months, by the Chantry's calendar. I have begun preparations, and I thought better than to inhibit your plans from taking root as well."

"I'm going."

"Wait, vhenan. Do you recall the nightmare?" Solas asked, with more words on the tip of his tongue.

"I don't like to." She stood, finally.

And then she sunk back down and glared at him. "Why?"

Solas frowned. "Nevermind. You may take your leave."

"No games."

"You _are_ the one playing them, are you not?"

"I'm at a disadvantage."

"I know."

"Solas, to clarify, you devoured the god-like ancient elf that I drank from the well of and am in eternal service to. You used her essence to bring me here, and now you want me to go after telling me I have seven months to live? That I have less than that to plan?" Rina felt what was left of her heart make a mess, as the walls continued to churn. The room, lit by hardly any veilfire, flooded in each of its corners with blue, flickering light.

"I am sorry."

"You could've sent a note." Rina smiled, for eternally mystifying reasons, and the room grew calm. "You're awfully convinced this is the only way to go. I don't like it. I don't respect it. I don't know that I like _you_ anymore, either."

"You are not obligated to."

"But I miss things about you. Corners of your existence that I don't think anyone would mind. There are better things to remember than the destroyer of worlds in my bed."

And the room went a melancholy kind of dark, except for the candle in the center of the table. They both felt crippled by the loss of a peer, even if one was merely mourning an outline of a man.

The death of light and lightness explained so much more than either could with words.

It was Rina who spoke first. "I can't see very well." She did not shape the Fade to meet her needs.

Solas laughed, dry like all his chuckles, and sparse like the best of them. "Neither can I."

 


	3. Clarity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rina gets her friend back for a time, as they share a few moments of total honesty in the Fade.

The lights never came back on. They sad in placid near-darkness, content with what either could see.

Solas had stronger vision in the dark than Rina, and it allowed him to catch her expression, where she only made out his motion clearly. He adjusted in his seat and leaned forward. With a snap of his fingers, the candle went out.

She was still smiling, and he understood.

"You think this absurd."

"I think everything is absurd," Rina replied, and her smile drooped. "Time has told me again and again that nothing makes sense."

"I believe you are wrong to try finding sense in the details. But sense in the great scheme of things? It will come. You will see connections where you once thought none existed."

Their conversations always came back to the philosophical, when they weren't about the strategy behind ruling. She always wondered how he gained so much insight into military strategy and how he had grown so politically savvy. And then she never had to again.

"Like you? Like who you really are?" Rina didn't sound hurt anymore. She could say each of his names, and they danced on her lips like tingling skin the Fade. "I mean, you're all you. I don't think Solas ends and the Dread Wolf begins." Again, she smiled. "Although the lies were devastating, once. It's not much of anything anymore, and I don't feel like I loved half a person, or more than a person for that matter."

So much was made clear at the foot of that eluvian, but she knew the shape of it long before. Halamshiral, where his drunken enthusiasm for courtly intrigue made her look closer.

"I knew you were lying to me, anyway. It's not like I didn't spend most of my life reading the inconsistencies in my children. Sure, the lies were about stolen bread or broken bows, but it all sounds the same after a while."

"Stolen bread?" He sighed. Or laughed.

"Lara."

"Orlesian swears and pet names? The young woman who asked questions and never had answers?" Sometimes Solas thought he knew Lara better than her mother. She was so obvious; so blunt. He could read her. She let him. That's the thing about children: their contentedness with being less than whole. It means there were cracks and crevices, but they never hid that fact. Irakos, her brother, was less transparent, but he was older, and thought his father was being replaced. That much was obvious. Their interactions were slow, meandering, and not unpleasant, but definitely not warm.

"You miss her, don't you?"

"I don't know." The answer was honest. Solas had honed himself to a sharp edge in the last months, but seeing Rina left them cracked, not rounded off. She never stopped changing everything.

"You said I have time. Do you want to see her again?"

"I can't."

"You absolutely can, and should. She misses you."

It felt wrong, as though Rina was the one weaving lies now. Lara was resilient and not one to mourn. She had so many pets at Skyhold, and when they met their end as short-lived forest critters tend to, she wasn't hurt. _I have my memories_ , Lara always said.

Maybe it was different with people.

Solas laced his fingers atop the table. Rina read blank to him.

"What?" She asked.

"It was nothing."

"It felt... like you could have said something."

"No, it would be better not to."

"Can I ask you to do something for me?"

"What is that?"

"Be crystal clear for five minutes. Dazzle me with emotion. You know, you're allowed to feel."

"I do feel. Regret, loss, and certainly sorrow, but I have not felt hope in years; I do now."

"Oh." That stung. Hope was a funny thing she learned to replace with determination and with control.

"You are allowed to feel, as well."

"I don't, sometimes. I treat my anger like fuel. Emotions are a malleable commodity."

"You are in denial, then?"

"Most of the time."

Crystal. Solas reached for her hand across the table, and she didn't recoil.

"Why the nightmare?" Rina asked.

"Because I am afraid, and I remembered."

" _You're_ afraid?"

"Of course I am. I don't know what you are going to do next. I do not know if you will continue trying, or if I will fail."

"Why are you afraid of what you want to happen?"

"What I want is not the same as what I need. It is the reality of this burden. Perhaps you _wanted_ to fight, but you knew that you needed to bring peace. I am aware you settled for your solutions, compromising your heart for the more necessary outcome. And certainly, you could argue with me now if you wanted, but you know that the world needs you yet, and resisting the chance for answers and for aid would get you nowhere."

"For the record, I don't want to argue, but I'm tired of talking. My life is talking. My life is _talks_ , which are different, and worthless, and trouble every time. I am so fucking composed you could rip the veil down right on top of Val Royeaux and I would keep my damn veneer of calm in the chaos."

"You're sure of that?"

"Are you?"

He traced circles atop her hand, and she wasn't sure if he knew it.


End file.
